The unfathomable bottomless stupidity of Suella Braverman

We've allowed morons to take control. And it's turning us into morons too.

We always do this. We descend into process-orientated technical details and 4D strategic calculations when the real problem is staring us in the face.

There are many complicated problems in the world. Is light a particle or a wave? Can we accommodate incommensurable goods in an open society? Can I justify getting a Sausage & Egg McMuffin Deliverooed to the flat when I'm really hungover? These are hard, complicated, serious problems. But Suella Braverman is not one of them. She is just a moron. And she is turning us into morons too.

Her comment piece in the Times appeared on Wednesday night, railing against "pro-Palestinian mobs", suggesting police bias and making a corrolation between Islamism and Northern Ireland marches. She managed to take three really very disparate groups - the police, pro-Palestine demonstrators and the people of Northern Ireland - and insult all of them at once. 

And then the row kicked off, good and hard. Lots of chatter about ministerial codes and the operational independence of the police and so on and so forth. But it's all irrelevant. 

The Braverman story is not about the ministerial code. Labour front bencher Pat McFadden issued a letter to Rishi Sunak yesterday demanding to know whether the code had been breached, written in the standard political form of a combat knife wrapped in technical inquiry. "To say the article was not cleared and then do nothing about it would strip you of all authority over the home secretary and leave her free to continue to say and do whatever she likes with no fear of sanction from you," he wrote. 

In reality, the issue is ultimately meaningless. The code says that "the policy content" of ministers' interventions should be "cleared in draft with the No.10 press and Private Offices". But there really wasn't any policy content in the Times piece. And anyway, it simply doesn't matter. Enforcement of the code is solely at the discretion of the prime minister.

People keep acting like we have some kind of independent disciplinary system for ministers. We do not. We have an informal, mates-based system which hands all powers to whoever is in Downing Street. If Sunak wanted to sack her he could do so, regardless of whether she had broken the code or not. If he wanted to keep her he could do so, regardless of whether she had broken the code or not. 

The Braverman story is also not about her tactical ingenuity. It's become almost a consensus in Westminster that the home secretary is trying to get sacked and that this is all part of her elaborate ruse. But that is of course unnecessary. If she wanted to do that, she could simply resign. She is not a genius. She is just very silly. She is a toddler inserting breadsticks into a DVD player. 

The Braverman story is about one thing and one thing only. It is that she is a moron. She is stupid in ways that can barely be described with words. She is an object lesson in the death of the human brain. She is an accumulation of dust on the floor of an unused factory. She is a moral imbecile. 

That's the real meaning behind that Times piece and it is the only pertinent piece of information we require. Of course Sunak should fire her, but not because of some code or other. He should do it because she is demonstrably intellectually incapable of doing the job. 

This is the key section of the Times piece in its entirety:

"Here we reach the heart of the matter. I do not believe that these marches are merely a cry for help for Gaza. They are an assertion of primacy for certain groups - particularly Islamists - of the kind we are more used to seeing in Northern Ireland. Also disturbingly reminiscent of Ulster are the reports that some of Saturday's march group organisers have links to terrorist groups, including Hamas."

Just put aside for a moment the moral and political inadequacy of what she's saying. More than anything it is simply very very foolish indeed. 

It is the Unionist community, particularly the Orange Order, that is known for marching in Northern Ireland. It is not the Republican movement. But the trouble for Braverman, of course, is that the Unionist parties are her allies. They're right-wing. They supported Brexit. They're pro-Israel. 

She didn't mean to write this. She meant to compare Islamism with dissident Republicanism. She wrote it because she had no idea what she was talking about. 

Why did that happen? Did it happen because she is playing some ingenious game of resignational strategy? No. It is because she is singularly ignorant. She quite literally has no idea what she is saying. She doesn't even know which side is which in Northern Ireland. That's the person we're dealing with. That's who we're being forced to talk about. 

This is par for the course. Stupidity is not a bar to progress in modern British politics. It is a requirement. 

Tory MP Mark Francois was a little known backbencher when he tore up a copy of a letter from Airbus' chief executive with the words: "My father was a D-Day veteran, he never submitted to bullying by any German. Neither will his son." Until this moment, hardly anyone had heard of him. But once it had happened, everything changed. Producers booked him on political debates. Journalists sought him for copy. He was made chair of the European Research Group. Suddenly, it was hard to escape him on our screens. A moment which should have ended his political career instead made it.

When we first encountered Tory MP Lee Anderson, he was doing a door knock with the journalist Michael Crick for the 2019 general election campaign. Without knowing his microphone was on, he told one of his acquaintances: "Make out you know who I am, that you know I'm the candidate but not that you are a friend". Then he introduced him to the journalist as if they'd only just met each other, only for his mate to start babbling about whipping people with a "cat of nine tails" and making them "wear a pink tutu". Over the years that followed, Anderson refused to watch England play because they took the knee, said we should send a Royal Navy frigate to Calais for a stand off over refugees, insisted poor people could cook meals for 30p a day and said asylum seekers should "fuck off back to France".

Again, the same process took place. Producers booked him. Journalists called him. He made good copy. He made for a colourful presence in the studio. 

Most importantly, all this content was basically free. Publications didn't have to pay investigative reporters for countless hours spent digging up the details of a story. News programmes didn't have to shell out millions to put a correspondent in Iraq or Afghanistan. They could get Francois or Anderson in, have them say something baseless and provocative, and watch it all catch fire. Some people would love it. Other people would love to hate it. And they'd all click on the links, just the same. They'd all watch it. Big numbers. No expense.

Soon enough, the moron becomes prominent. And once they're prominent, they're selected for a formal role with the party as a way of appealing to the moron base. That's what happened with Anderson, who is currently the deputy chairman of the Conservative party. It's also what happened with Nadine Dorries, who was made media secretary and now spends her time imagining frenzied conspiracy theories with the approval of a man who believes in lizard people. 

Idiots succeed. And they do not succeed despite their idiocy. They succeed because of it. 

Braverman's rise has been defined by precisely the same dynamic. And now she has reached such a high position of prominence that her foolishness is dissolving the policy framework of the country.

Take next week's ruling by the Supreme Court on the Rwanda case. This is held up by commentators as a reason Sunak might struggle to fire Braverman. What if he gets rid of her and then she's vindicated?

But the problem is she cannot be vindicated, because the Rwanda case doesn't mean anything. Sure, she'll be humiliated if she loses and she'll claim victory if she wins, but none of it has any objective purchase, because the Rwanda plan does not fix the problem it is positioned to solve.

Rwanda made a total of 487 asylum decisions in 2021. As of July 2023, there were 136,779 cases in the UK asylum backlog. Even if Britain uses up the country's entire asylum capacity, it would be a drop in the ocean.

The whole thing is composed of nothingness. It doesn't make the slightest practical difference to the issue at hand. And yet we've now spent a year and a half talking about this plan. Next week, reporters will act like the government's fate depends on it. 

This is where we are now. In the land of the halfwit, a place defined by the contours of their abject dimwittery. And it's not just dissolving our minds. It is a direct cause for the failure of our policy prescriptions. After all the talk of ministerial codes and police independence this week, that's the ultimate issue here. We are governed by morons. And their presence makes morons of us all.

One thing that made me happy

There's a place in Barcelona called the Nightmare Horror Museum. I know what you're thinking. You want paella and priorat and trips to the Sagrada Familia and all that classy stuff. Well, you're wrong. I mean, fine, all those things are outstanding, especially the priorat, but the real find in Barcelona is the Nightmare Horror Museum. 

We went in there on a whim, expecting a shit patchwork job with creepy clown puppets. What we were treated to instead is the single most terrifying experience of my adult life. I'm not making that up. I'm not exaggerating. It is a highly effective exercise at the base level of human fear. At one point, as I crept through total darkness trying to escape a room, knowing with absolute certainty that there was a man right behind me with a chainsaw, I reached that childhood state of night-fever horror. I came very, very close to having to use the safeword and stop the experience. 

I know that non-horror people don't get this stuff. But if you do like horror, you know why we do. It's because afterwards, when we made it outside, and we sat down at a bar somewhere and got a drink, we felt utterly vividly alive. It's really great stuff. Highly recommended.